The whirring of course is my laptop, because I’m turning it off. I’m closing it all down and stopping work at 62% of full-time. I tried to compile all of the reasons why I wanted to do this but it was all over the place so I decided on another word-puke because I’m feeling moody.

I don’t respect Facebook. I believe that all of these targeting options we have available to get your messaging out only in front of certain audiences is a technology the world is not responsible enough to have, and no matter what Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions are with that platform that’s still a point we cannot ignore. 🙁

It could be used for good, the potential is so clearly THERE but he’s missing the point. Transparency is what we need. I’ve asked a few of my friends this question:

Would you trust ads more if you know why and how they targeted you?

And most of them said, yes they would. This did not surprise me at all. I only asked like 7 people so the sample size renders that experiment unusable but I it would still stand if scaled. Advertising is mysterious. People need to know how it is decided what content is in that stream that they are always stuck in.

Mobile phone addiction this year and in the foreseeable future is going to become more and more of a problem. Already, Facebook reports 56% of store purchases are influenced by digital interactions and 66% of those interactions are happening on mobile. We have our heads stuck in the screen and the trend is only growing, even for our children (alarmingly, pls don’t buy your kids phones ty).

I have all of this extra time now, and what am I going to do with it? Patiently wait for the weather to get better. Frustrating, pace around the kitchen and into each room. Wait for a new tenant to take over my apartment. Wait to move all my belongings out of Eugene, then somewhere else, and to figure out whats next because I accept that I love not knowing. Going to enjoy some soft lung bullshit on youtube and appreciate the ideas of all the digital and analog people I’ve met so far.

Drank 2 gallons of orange juice this week, it’s helping with the depression. I recommend you try it, too.

As the months swim by me, the changes and directions we are all experiencing are predictable and complex. My small family of humans, animals, plants and dreams. It is April 9th, 2017. A Sunday. Since we last spoke, my younger sister went into an early labor at 22 weeks pregnant. Baby Zeke managed to stay in until 23 weeks, when he was born at Tampa General Hospital. She was taken by Bayflight helicopter from Trinity to Tampa General after staying for 2 nights in Trinity with excessive bleeding. He is doing stable right now, but the reality of her micropremie and seeing him struggle to develop outside of the womb is completely heartbreaking and fascinating and generally super intense all at the same time. His skin at first was a bright pink and is now looking a lot like translucent flesh. He’s so small.. not even 2lbs yet. I look at him sometimes and just stare and every minute he’s in a different, fragile state. He doesn’t look real. He seems like another doll on the shelf, just this tiny human that sometimes moves his still forming body around and is breathing and existing with the help of some tubes and a lot of machinery. It’s been very hard figuring out how to react, I am so scared for this little human and his mother. I feel like I have been reading prognosis journals ever since it happened, obsessing over the outcome and just praying to god and not even knowing what to say to my sister. He’s been a miracle for his entire conception and all I can do is keep praying grows stronger and stronger every day.

When I leave the Hospital, I am still of course working and building gardens and this time around planning details of my very soon move to Oregon, on the west coast of the U.S.

Further away than I have ever been. A new city, a new climate, and new opportunities. The time has come to finally leave Florida and all of her bad memories and good memories and growth and fun and overpopulation problems and everything like that. I’m leaving so much behind, including a struggling nephew and a human I fell in love with and will always adore and a lot of bad habits, too.

I’m leaving behind my lack of creativity, my boredom and my cries. I am leaving behind beautiful gardens I made, and relationships I built. I’m leaving behind some heroes, some family and some friends.

But what awaits me, I truly feel is worth all I’m leaving behind here in Florida.

Life is not slowing down for me or anyone. I still have so much I want to do.

I have not written here in 6 months. That is a long time for someone with everything to lose. The things that can happen in a month would astound you. You never think about time and how it truly changes things until you are thinking retrospectively and can put in the proper perspective to realize the vast evolutions your life goes through.

The array of feelings, situations, the choices you decide to remain consistent with. The breakdowns. The feeling of fear, of regression, of being incapable.

The flowers I have grown. The smiles and tears. The different stages of my home.

In the last 6 months, I went to North Carolina and back twice. I drove through the foggy mountains alone and I slept at a rest stop. I walked in the woods along the highway. I turned 27 years old. I moved out of my first apartment. I lost my best friend and beautiful cat, Duchess. I’ve had acquaintances die suddenly, and lost my ability to drink and socialize. I’ve gone hunting for antiques my my home area of Florida and collected new dolls and interesting relics. I’ve concentrated on death. I’ve lost the ability to feel proud of my work. I stopped painting. I invested my time in building a garden and have grown into a love of earthships, sustainable living, and terraforming.

I got a call from a hospital in Maryland and found out my sister attempted to take a number on her life and I dropped everything and went to get her. I drove for 4 days there and back, returning to work on a Friday.

I brought her and her boyfriend, Chris into my home. We are building the trailerhome together and making it beautiful and worthy of the title “home”. Best of all, I think we are making it work. It’s such a relief having one less thing to exhaust my mind with, the safety of my baby sister is no longer one of them. I sleep sounder in that knowledge.

All in all, everything feels stable now. Everything is as ok as it’s ever been, and looks to only have potential for getting better every day.

I have so much new art and thoughts to share with you all, I sure wish I weren’t so shy.

It takes at least 3 generations to break a family out of the poverty line. Something like that, I recall during one of my recent late night “reading” or “scrolling through my phone in the dark” sessions, the modern day equivalent of what one may have imagined as flipping through a book or a magazine even just ten years ago.

This one little tidbit of information, as inoffensive as can be, brings me such great anxieties. Do you ever live in fear of repeating the same exact mistakes you were born into? I’m constantly at ends with myself, wondering if it’s just a self fulfilling prophecy, and then at the same time longing for the irresponsible pastimes that I know would get me in the very same spot i’m so afraid of being in to begin with.

What matters in life? Is it being comfortable, having something people would be proud of?

Is it something else entirely, some other random thing that brings you personal joy? Is it a number of things, the variety of experience itself that lends to you your happiness?

I’ve been so tired lately, and so sad, I am missing things. Im working my life away, and when I am not working I am trying my absolute best to turn something terrible into something beautiful- which can sometimes be a simple task but it gets quite complicated when that terrible something is a ruined home, and that beautiful thing is a restored, beautiful home.

I feel that I cannot rest and I am overwhelmed. I am 26 and I didn’t know this would happen to me and I am wholeheartedly overwhelmed.

I own this terrible home, or rather, this terrible home owns me.

I miss myself.

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It is March and I find that I just keep getting worse at this whole being a blogger thing but I haven’t abandoned ship yet and I just keep getting busier! I do have my fair share of excuses though. My last job did not work out as all of the clues I picked up on regarding their management practices manifested into the downsizing of a five person company. Lol.

I did not leave without something bigger on my mind, and that something bigger is what I am still working as a trial period employee for the next two weeks but you know I will write about the company and position in another post if it works out for me! I am well on my way to being a literal expert on Facebook advertising. Hell, I even had to sign up to a brand new set of newsletters 🙂 Learning things and being challenged at my job is a really nice feeling and I hope that at the very least moving forward with my life I won’t have to feel bored by what I do for a living ever again. Also, the position is remote and most everyone (if not everyone) else in the company is Italian or from Italy! It is an absolute pleasure and learning opportunity at the very least but I am hoping to see how much I can accomplish in a Saas position with them in the future.

<complain> For the new position, I had to buy a new laptop and consequently have the most annoying experience in my generally annoy-free life: buying a broken computer. After 3 weeks of using it perfectly fine (despite it being a windows 8 and thus very irritating in good working order) shut down suddenly and loudly gave me the ominous beep codes 3, 5 and 8. Over and over. Every time I tried to turn it on. Ruined an entire Friday night for me. I will try not to complain about it forever like I very well could but Tiger Direct refused to handle the issue and do a trade in. No wonder you’re all going bankrupt. Don’t sell broken hardware. </complain>

All is well, I am going to eventually get my laptop fixed and get what I spent good, hard earned money on. I have been happier! I have been challenged in many aspects of my life that had remained stagnant for so long and am ready to surprise myself. Right now I am listening to an old Radiohead album remix from 2004. Old, from 2004. Look at me now, I’m living in the future. I am 25 and 2004 was years ago. This will be a beautiful year.

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I brewed such a big pot of coffee only to find out that there is no milk or creamer but that seems to be the way of the world, isn’t it?

I’m here again at my home away from home and I was instinctively drawn to my keyboard and my blog and I just thought to myself, “silly girl, you don’t even have a home.” Nowhere feels welcome. No one isn’t bothered by me, and I hate that about myself that I am so naturally contradictory to everyone I love and care about. My love of stains and mess and disarray, my inherent shyness and compulsion to stay out of everyone’s way makes them inevitably feel like I am being passive aggressive and that is so far from the actual truth that I want to cry. I just want my own space to exist in and stare at puddles of paint of the floor and not worry about anything until I absolutely have to and get out of everyone I love’s way.

Since we last spoke, I was still an intern and I am proud to say that I flew my way on to the payroll with my company and I am excited about learning new things every day and helping this start-up become more efficient, streamlined, organized, and good in every respect. I am constantly thinking about ways to improve things, and I am learning things in a perpetual motion. I am so inspired by my roommate but I am terribly afraid of how much she dislikes who I am so I am in the process of trying to save enough money to get out of her house and away from under her skin.

So many nights pass before I feel overwhelmed enough to write, and this is very therapeutic for me. I have broken hearts, I have fallen in and out of love more times than I care to admit. I have picked so many flowers, I have gone on many walks, held many hands and kissed many cheeks. Hundreds of flocks of birds swarming in the sky together. Hundreds of cups of piping hot coffee. So, so, so very many bowls of ramen noodles for lunch and public bus rides back to my friends house where I sleep on a foam mattress on the floor and feel bad about being there. So many nights I graze my hips with my razor blade and wish had more and even more than that, nights where I am so impressed with myself for not having drug addictions or children or collapsed veins from the life I feel like I just barely escaped. We’re all just hurting and channeling our pain in the interesting and infinite possibilities of ways to channel pain. I am grateful right now. I am grateful for the black coffee I am drinking, for the vinyl copy of my favorite pixies album that my friend bought for me, grateful for the place I’ve been living for the last few months and I am grateful for my job. I will never stop striving to be better. I will never stop wondering, how do I paint the sea foam?

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A few weeks later and a few more things later and here I am again, loudly playing my weird music and writhing with the comfort of hot soup resting in the pit of my belly. The situation with my friend Ed who lost his car is better if not fixed entirely! His car has been fixed, the nose of the vehicle having been completely replaced so his black car has an albino nose that glitters in the sunlight- and he has gotten himself not just one job but two! Achievement unlocked: stability. For now we are eating fish and chicken every night and being grateful for each other. I made a mistake in my own personal mental homeostasis has been compromised by actual love and I just keep kissing dogs and boys and painting. I received an email the assistant curator of ICA Publishing to submit my artwork to be published in the most recent publication that they do and I am happy and excited about that opportunity! Likewise, a very good friend of mine living in Orlando may have found me a perfect live-in position which would remove e from New Port Richey for a few months anyways , so I can become a recluse and convince myself love is very very bad for me again. I’m excited and nervous. On an entirely different note, my fathers music career is finally budding and I am going to be making a series of art work to promote his music and the legalization of marijuana! Its something everyone in my entire family has been passionate about for years and its about time I committed some of my own art to promote that cause. For the past few days I have been thinking about the concept of set theory and tinkering in thoughts of numbers on my own suggestion for the first time in years and I enjoy it. I am trying to use that side of my brain more. Trying to train myself into mental equality/ morphing. I am still making art every day. I post more or less everything on my instagram. I am being happy. I am going to transition so smoothly into working full time again and live alone and get a kitten and maybe a bigger harddrive and university classes again like a perfectly normal, well adjusted and goal oriented twenty-something that I should be by now. au voir.

It’s four days before mothers day, so I guess my own mother decided to appropriately use the holiday to soften the blow of telling me she’s gonna sell the place I have been living and subleasing from her in two months. I took it well considering this particular month is the financial collapse resulting from a bad decision and a dedication to fun that is totally unwarranted. My domain name, www.camicamirobot.com, over drafted my account so I have no money for another two weeks and now I need to save up for a new one by July. I still smiled when I saw a few baby blackbirds bathing in a puddle this morning, on my way to an antique store to listen to them briefly tell me they don’t sell antique Asian dolls and would be closing soon to attend a funeral.

At any other point in my life, I swear a day like today would have crumbled me but I spent all day yesterday painting with Holly and I was happy. She woke up with a cold and I made her some tea and got medicine and I realized later on that we are all broke because we help each other and I wouldn’t trade my lending or fun for anything else in the world. I had Ed Hopper in the passenger seat next to me, with Holly and Dalton in the back and we were driving through Tarpon Springs via alt. 19 through a sea of beaten up Gyro and Cuban shops and everything was bright and Ed was going on about the difference between the world with glasses and the washed out world he sees with just his glasses on and I couldn’t even pay attention because I was too lost in thought about my friend who draws comics and pedophilia and counseling and the unfair judgement of society and its refusal to even offer help to an entire population of people that exist in the world and meanwhile later I would get a text message about my living situation that can only be described as annoying and I’m not scared by it or anything at all and realistically, one of my only concerns is where I am actually going to keep all of these vintage buttons. Buttons from when my Grandmother was in school for Fashion Design, years long ago that I could swear the people and flowers and places lacked pigment and she looked at photos of her Hat Model mom who wrote poetry and was distant and sad and all I do with them is keep them in this fucking tin on my floor. I wonder if someone would buy them and love them and transform them into things and help me pay my rent, but even if I don’t sell them they deserve a better fate that what has been dealt. Its a prolonged transitional period and they deserve to live a little. Until then I will keep making strange button mandalas out of them as per my morning ritual. Wish me luck in my life, friends. I feel like I’m just being blindly optimistic at this point. I should be scared but I know deep down I did this on purpose because I love a little challenge.